[Laforet]

Modern breeding involves actively mutating known species with DNA-altering chemical mutagen and ionising radiation. Think fuzzing vs. static code analysis, which one would you do first when it comes to debugging?

>Breeding is selection of a pathetically tiny set of modifications, but GM is on a whole other level.

The truth is probably closer to the opposite of this: most GM species in the pipeline are rather unimaginative ones improving one phenotype at a time, and the vast majority of them focus on pest or herbicide resistance. There is a couple of near commercial crops aimed at improving nutritional content such as golden rice and high-lysine corn, but they are more exceptions than the rule.

The kind of totally disruptive GM e.g. introduce C3 photosynthesis in C4 plants, has not left the drawing board yet for a good reason.

[vbuwivbiu]

Your argument is that GM is less powerful than breeding because people have been "unimaginative" with it ?

OK if you wanted to create, say, a fluorescent horse, which technique would you use:

* GM

* breeding with radiation and chemical mutagens

You have one month.

[Laforet]

Neither technique will work in the timeframe you specified because gestation time for horses are almost a year long.

On the other hand, one can slowly breed for desirable traits such as speed, endurance or disease resistance in horses, good luck doing that with GM.

[vbuwivbiu]

The point wasn't how long it would take for the organism to gestate, it was how long it would take for the trait to be introduced into the organism.

We can do that precisely for fluorescence and many other traits with GM today, but good luck trying to breed a fluorescent horse, it could take millions of years if at all.

[Laforet]

There is no reliable or efficient vector to introduce fluoresence to somatic cells in a horse-sized animal, so no, 1 month is still way too short. You seem to have a highly romanticised idea about the capability of GM but it is misguided.

Besides, GFP fluoresence is the proverbial low hanging fruit as it is robustly expressed in many cell types but has very little practical value. Inserting useful traits via GM is often no short cut because they are rarely determined by a single gene.

[vbuwivbiu]

the point isn't about actually growing an adult fluorescent horse, it's about proving the principle in an embryo - which takes days. It's already been done with mice, but I agree it's a simple example.

Your point about multiple genes is a very good one but we have a good understanding of how some gene networks work already and the rest will follow.

[Laforet]

The problem with embyros is that they can be inject with any DNA for a trasient positive result but these may well be discarded or inactivated during development. The recently debuked STAP cells used injected embyros as evidence and it turned out to be either a fluke or outright fraud. To prove the concept you really need a stable F1 generation to illustrate that the trait can be passed down in the germline.

I'd say that our ability to interact with the genome is still rather crude, else we'd have already cured cancer by now - we already have a pretty good understanding of the cellular biology of cancer but it only helps us so much.